Love rekindled after more than 60 years apart

Thursday

May 13, 2010 at 12:01 AMMay 13, 2010 at 1:09 PM

He was a dapper mechanic with the look of a movie star; she was a nurse with the natural beauty of a runway model. They faced the ravages of World War II, fighting in the Polish underground against the German invasion and then the Soviet invasion.

Jerzy Krzyzanowski is as giddy as a schoolboy, his face glowing and his smile stretching from one ruddy cheek to the other.

Today, nearly 70 years after falling in love with Danuta Lazorko, the couple will wed.

He's 85 and from Upper Arlington. She's 84 and from Gdansk, Poland.

But they were once young, and together, in their native Lublin, Poland.

He was a dapper mechanic with the look of a movie star; she was a nurse with the natural beauty of a runway model. They faced the ravages of World War II, fighting in the Polish underground against the German invasion and then the Soviet invasion.

It was the Soviets who separated them first, tossing Krzyzanowski in a POW camp for three years. But Lazorko waited and in 1947 they were reunited. Despite their shared past, the reunion didn't last.

Krzyzanowski began university studies in Warsaw, Poland, and married Elzbieta Kuraszkiewicz in 1948. They moved to the United States in 1959 when he was invited to set up a Slavic-languages program in Berkeley, Calif.

Eventually, they landed in Columbus with their three sons, and, for nearly 30 years, Krzyzanowski wrote books and taught Slavic languages and literature at Ohio State University.

Lazorko, too, married in the 1940s. She raised two daughters in Poland with her husband, Karol. Middle age passed. She had five grandchildren and then four great-grandchildren.

For more than 60 years, Krzyzanowski and Lazorko had no contact.

Then, last November, Krzyzanowski was on a trip to Poland promoting his most recent book. He'd been widowed for four years and, on a whim, looked up his childhood sweetheart's phone number on the Internet.

"I called her, and she answered me very warmly and said, 'Come on over,'" Krzyzanowski said. He learned that she, too, had been widowed for four years. And the spark once again was lighted.

Her family received him like an old friend, and they visited for four days. Then, Krzyzanowski had to catch his flight home to Columbus.

Every night after that, they talked using Skype software on their computers. They decided to marry.

"There were too many things connecting us in the past," Lazorko said yesterday as they sat close together on the couch at Krzyzanowski's home.

Krzyzanowski translated for his Polish-speaking bride-to-be, who has learned just one English phrase since arriving in Columbus on April 24: "I love you."

But even after their decision to marry, getting together proved challenging.

Krzyzanowski was supposed to travel to Poland in early April to attend a ceremony in connection with his book and bring his fiancee back. But the ceremony was postponed when the Polish president and several cabinet members were killed in a plane crash on April 10 in western Russia.

Lazorko then decided she would fly alone, and Krzyzanowski drove to Chicago to meet her plane. That's when Iceland's volcano erupted, halting travel from Poland for days. After two days of waiting in Chicago, Krzyzanowski drove back to Columbus.